Trump Responds to Woodward-Costa Book

Sept. 15, 2021 (EIRNS)—Former President Donald Trump published a comment on Telegram last night, on media reports of Gen. Mark Milley’s actions to take control of the military away from the President, as recounted by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril. Trump wrote that, if that account is true, “then I assume he would be tried for TREASON in that he would have been dealing with his Chinese counterpart behind the President’s back and telling China that he would be giving them notification ‘of an attack.’ Can’t do that!”

Trump went on to say that “The good news is that the story is Fake News concocted by a weak and ineffective General together with two authors who I refused to give an interview to because they write fiction, not fact. Actions should be taken immediately against Milley....” Most importantly, Trump stressed: “For the record, I never even thought of attacking China—and China knows that. The people that fabricated the story are sick and demented, and the people who print it are just as bad. In fact, I’m the only President in decades who didn’t get the U.S. into a war—a well known fact that is seldom reported.”

Trump also spoke to Newsmax hosts Sean Spicer and Lyndsay Keith on Sept. 14, Tuesday evening: “I’ve had so many calls today saying that’s treason.... So first of all, if it is actually true—which is hard to believe that he would have called China and done these things and was willing to advise them in advance of an attack—that’s treason.” Trump said the idea was “totally ridiculous.... For him to say that I would even think about attacking China, I think [Milley is] trying to just get out of his incompetent withdrawal out of Afghanistan, the dumbest thing that anybody has seen.”

Trump, however, chose to focus the entire matter through the partisan lens of his attacks on the Biden administration, rather than pointing to the glaring irony that Milley, who is still chairman of the JCS under Biden, is now actively trying to reverse Biden’s policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan and trying to stage a de facto coup against him as well—because Biden executed what was Trump’s policy of pulling out of Afghanistan.